by The Brothers Bulger: How They Terrorized;Corrupted Boston for a Quarter Century
The Fitzgerald bombing, though, was more complicated. It had occurred in Middlesex County, where it was more difficult to broom a case than in Boston. And the lawyer was, at least in the public mind, a civilian who had merely happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fitzgerald had lost a leg in the bombing, which made him an even more sympathetic figure. In short, Middlesex County needed a scalp, and Condon had one picked out—Stevie’s old partner, Frank Salemme, who was also hiding out in Manhattan.
If everything could be worked out properly, Salemme’s capture would be good for everybody—except for Salemme, that is. Rico and Condon wanted the credit for the pinch to go to their new protégé in the bureau, Zip Connolly.
Zip was yet another native of the Old Colony Harbor projects. He’d graduated from Boston College in the same class with Johnny Martorano’s brother, Jimmy, then briefly, unhappily attended law school. In 1968, Zip was at loose ends, and he needed some advice. He ran into Paul Rico’s partner, Dennis Condon, and Boston police detective Eddie Walsh, an old friend of the Connolly family’s. Both Condon and Walsh would later brag that they had “recruited” Zip. Then Connolly stopped by the State House to visit his old neighbor and now state rep, Billy Bulger, to discuss career opportunities in law enforcement.
On August 1, 1968, U.S. House Speaker John McCormack wrote a personal note to his old friend J. Edgar Hoover on behalf of a constituent.
“Dear Edgar,” the letter began. “It has come to my attention that the son of a lifelong personal friend has applied to become a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation….”
Zip was appointed to the FBI in October 1968. He began his FBI career in Baltimore and then San Francisco before he was transferred back east to New York. But like Stevie, he still wanted to get back to Boston, to be closer to his ailing father. Condon and Rico were bumping up against the FBI’s mandatory retirement age, but Connolly was just a kid, barely thirty. He could be their go-to guy in the Boston FBI office for the next twenty years, whatever their second careers turned out to be.
But first they had to get him back to Boston. Connolly was the guy who could take down Salemme. Every few days, Flemmi and Salemme would get together in Central Park. They’d sit on a park bench and swap secondhand gossip about what was going on back in Boston. One day, early in 1972, as soon as they sat down on a park bench, Stevie delivered some big news.
“I’m getting out of here,” he told Salemme. “It’s too hot down here.”
His next stop would be Montreal, Flemmi explained to a stunned Salemme. And as Flemmi prepared to flee, Condon began establishing the paper trail to explain Connolly’s impending capture of Salemme.
In 1998, under oath in federal court, Condon was asked about all the memos he sent to Connolly in the days before Salemme’s arrest.
“I believe I sent him a couple of photographs [of Salemme] and said: See if you can spot—spark them up down there.”
Once Stevie was safely out of New York, the plan to make Zip Connolly a hero could proceed. In 2003, Salemme told congressional investigators what happened almost immediately after Stevie fled.
“Shortly after that,” Salemme said, “I was bumped into by John Connolly on 83rd Street and 3rd Avenue.”
By the time Salemme was shipped back to Massachusetts to stand trial for the bombing, Stevie Flemmi was safely established in Montreal. He would say later that those were the best years of his life. On the witness stand, he later claimed, unconvincingly, that he didn’t even want to return to Boston. He said H. Paul Rico made him come back. Working at a print shop, Stevie kept up with the Salemme trial in the Boston papers. The case went badly for Frank—he was convicted of bombing the car that belonged to John Fitzgerald and shipped off to state prison for sixteen years.
But the main witness against Salemme also testified that Stevie was not present at the bombing. Then he vanished, not to be seen again for twenty years. In May 1974 Rico called Stevie in Montreal and told him it was time to come home.
Once the charges against him were officially dismissed, Stevie was warmly welcomed back at the garage on Marshall Street. Stevie moved back in with his mistress, Marion Hussey, in Milton, and was soon sleeping with her fifteen-year-old daughter as well. He found another girlfriend, Debra Davis, at a Brookline gas station, and when her father objected, he drowned mysteriously. In short, it was business as usual for Stevie, and business as usual meant talking to the FBI.
But now there would be someone else in the mix—Whitey. Unlike Stevie, Whitey still hadn’t been officially “opened” by the FBI as an informant. Later Zip invented a story about how he recruited Whitey as an informant as they sat in an FBI car on a moonlit night at Carson Beach in 1975.
But the reality was less cinematic, and more pragmatic. It was an arranged marriage between Whitey and Stevie, and the marriage broker was the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Once Zip was back in Boston, Billy told him to keep Whitey out of trouble. That would be Johnny Martorano’s testimony, and Billy, under oath, didn’t deny it.
As Flemmi testified in 1998: “[Whitey] didn’t just approach me cold and say: ‘Hey, here’s what I’m doing,’” Flemmi said in 1998. “I mean, it didn’t make sense. I would have been wondering what was going on here.”
In court, Flemmi said that Whitey approached him one day in the garage in 1974 and told him he was talking to Connolly. Later, Whitey would tell Stevie that Connolly wanted to meet him, and that the introduction would be handled by Dennis Condon. They met in what Flemmi described as an “obscure” coffee shop in Newton. It was a cordial get-together. Flemmi asked how Paul Rico was, and Condon said he was fine. It was, Flemmi said, “like a transition.”
By 1975, Whitey had officially joined Flemmi as a Top Echelon informant for the FBI. It was quite a feather in his cap, considering that he had spent almost his entire post-prison career in the South Boston rackets, and had practically no access to the information that the FBI was still most interested in gathering—about the Mafia. Stevie was much more tied into Prince Street and the Angiulos’ satellite crews in East Boston and Revere. Stevie would talk to the Mafia, and pass on whatever he’d learned to Whitey.
And Whitey would pass it on to Zip, who would write it up, giving most, if not all, of the credit, to Whitey. The question that has always lingered is, why exactly did the FBI need Whitey if they had Stevie?
The answer was, they didn’t need Whitey nearly as much as they needed his brother Billy. The retirement age for agents was fifty, and they always fretted about their post-FBI jobs. Their federal pensions weren’t nearly as large as they would later become. It was easier for a retired agent to find a new job if he knew somebody, and if he hadn’t made any enemies. And what was so wrong with helping out the brother of a rising legislator who might someday be in a position to put in a good word for a retiring, middle-aged agent?
Whitey was an informant, after all. He did meet, first with Condon, then Zip, and finally other agents as the years went by. And, according to FBI regulations, some informant had to be cited for every bit of information in each report—so why not Whitey? Stevie came up with enough information for two people, and if Whitey got credit for some of the tips, well, how exactly was that a problem? No money was changing hands, at least not yet. And if, down the road, some retired agent from the Boston office were to become Boston police commissioner or director of security for Boston Edison—well, so be it. It wouldn’t be the first time either of those jobs had been given to a politically connected retired G-man.
As time went by, and Billy solidified his grip on state government, Zip would make a habit of inviting the new agents to a tour of the State House, where he would introduce them to the Senate president, “the most powerful man in the state,” as one of the corrupted agents later described Billy.
Things were looking up for Whitey, but he still needed to eliminate some of his old rivals in the Town. Spike O’Toole, an old friend of the McLaughlin brothers, was the first to go. He was a regul
ar at the Bulldog Tavern on Savin Hill Avenue, even though the bar’s owner, an ex-prizefighter named Eddie Connors, was tight with Howie Winter. Connors tipped off Howie about Spike’s pub crawls, and Winter told Connors to give him a call the next time Spike was tying one on at the Bulldog.
Sitting in a black car on a Saturday night in December 1973, Johnny Martorano waited for Spike to stagger out of the Bulldog, then machine-gunned him in front of the Avenue Laundry. Hit at least ten times, O’Toole stumbled out onto Dorchester Avenue, knocking over a mailbox as he toppled over. The black car then sped off, in the direction of South Boston.
O’Toole’s murder put Paulie McGonagle at the top of what they all called the Hit Parade. Whitey handled that one himself, with help from a tough local barfly named Tommy King. Whitey buried McGonagle on Tenean Beach—it was the first interment in one of the three death pits where five more of Whitey’s victims would be interred over the next decade. Whitey drove McGonagle’s car to Charlestown, pushed it off a pier, and then threw Paulie’s wallet into the water. Whitey liked to make his victims “do the Houdini,” as his acquaintances from New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, the Westies, used to say. Everyone might have a pretty good idea what had happened, but they could never really be sure. And with any luck, McGonagle’s remaining friends might decide he’d been done in by Charlestown hoods and take misguided revenge against the Townies, thereby thinning the herd of Whitey’s rivals even further.
Next to go was Eddie Connors, the owner of the Bulldog Tavern, who’d fingered Spike O’Toole a year or so earlier. By 1975, Connors had been arrested in a botched robbery, which was bad enough, but he had also taken to bragging about his role in setting up O’Toole for Howie Winter. It was a dangerous sort of name-dropping, and Howie Winter coldly told Eddie to give him the number of a “safe” telephone where he could call Connors to discuss the matter. Once Howie got the number, he turned it over to Johnny Martorano, who from his sources at the telephone company discovered that it came back to a pay phone at a gas station on Morrissey Boulevard.
On June 12, 1975, Connors was to appear at the station at 9:00 p.m. to receive the call from Howie. One hundred yards away, 150 cops were enjoying a banquet. All would later report that they hadn’t heard a thing. The only problem was a Metropolitan District Commission police traffic detail, almost directly across the boulevard from the phone booth. Whitey quickly found another phone booth and called in a false accident report to the MDC police. The traffic detail immediately left to answer the alarm, and moments later Connors pulled up in his Cadillac to await the call. When the phone rang and he stepped into the booth, Johnny Martorano, Whitey Bulger, and Stevie Flemmi pulled up next to the booth in a stolen car. Whitey and Stevie jumped out and riddled the telephone booth with bullets. Connors died at the scene.
It was Whitey’s and Stevie’s first hit together. It would not be their last.
All the murders were planned at Howie Winter’s garage. The only legitimate business operating there was a body shop jointly owned by Stevie, Johnny Martorano’s younger brother, Jimmy, and George Kaufman, Frank Salemme’s old partner in the auto repair business on Massachusetts Avenue.
Kaufman always had an auto body shop or used car lot of some kind where the non-Mafia crews hung out; he was also a jack-of-all-trades for the Mob—a liaison to both the Jewish bookies they shook down and whatever gang members happened to be in prison at the time. He never made much money, though, because after a while, Kaufman’s regular customers would realize who they were rubbing elbows with, and business would fall off and Kaufman would have to pack up and move again, and then Stevie and Whitey would show up once more and the same scene would play out all over again.
Inside the Marshall Street complex, the first office belonged to the guys who actually operated a garage. Further back in the building was the real inner sanctum of the crew—where Howie Winter and Johnny Martorano held court. No one who owed money ever wanted to be escorted into that part of the building. On the wall hung a poster of two vultures perched on a cactus overlooking a desert, with one vulture saying to the other: “Patience, hell. I want to kill somebody.”
There were often females at the garage—wives, girlfriends, and neighborhood women who brought over food for the guys. Most of the crew enjoyed having them around, but not Whitey. He asked them inappropriate questions, and he glared at them, giving the women the you-don’t-belong-here looks that any black teenager outside Southie High on H Street would have understood only too well.
Since so many underworld characters had their cars worked on by Kaufman, they would often stop by the office just to chat, with their keys in hand. If anyone of whatever status in organized crime ever twirled their key chains, Whitey would immediately demand that they stop.
“I can’t stand that twirling,” Whitey would say, in great agitation. “It reminds me of the screws at Alcatraz.”
Still, Whitey had his strengths. He was handy with a machine gun, and he had those high-ranking police sources in Boston. One night, after everyone else had gone home, Stevie Flemmi and Jimmy Martorano were closing up the garage when a task force of cops raided the garage and began rifling through the desks. In Whitey’s desk, one of the plainclothes cops discovered a list of undercover state cops, descriptions of their cars, and the untraceable license plates on the vehicles.
“Where’d he get this list?” one of them asked Stevie. “That list?” Stevie said. “I thought everybody had one of those.”
The cops left in a huff. No crimes had been committed.
Everyone kept their separate rackets—Whitey had the bars in Southie, Stevie had loansharking and prostitution in Roxbury—but they also had deals going together. At its height, the gang’s most prominent members included Howie Winter and his bookkeeper, Sal Sperlinga, the Martorano brothers, and Whitey and Stevie. Also around were George Kaufman, and two other Irish guys from Somerville—Jimmy Sims and Joe McDonald, the oldest of the crew, born in 1917.
McDonald was typical of the gang. He was a skilled killer— he’d gotten a lot of experience during the Irish Gang War— but not nearly as effective at more routine criminal enterprises. The Hill was quite proficient at killing rival mobsters to take over their rackets, but once they gained control, they had no idea how to run them. That was the lesson of Winter Hill’s disastrous foray into gambling after wiping out Indian Joe’s crew. In what should have been a fabulously profitable enterprise, Winter Hill lost its shirt.
One problem for the Winter Hill gangsters is that they enjoyed partaking in their own vices. Both Howie Winter and Johnny Martorano were themselves degenerate gamblers. Like their marks, they spent Sunday afternoons in the fall drinking beer and watching pro football on TV, often doubling up on the late West Coast games as they tried desperately to get even.
Whitey and Stevie learned from their mistakes.
“They didn’t drink,” said Salemme. “They didn’t gamble.” As the years went by, Whitey and Stevie lost interest in running any kind of gambling operation. They would eventually only provide one service—protection. Bookies, drug dealers, truck hijackers—they all needed “protection,” and Whitey and Stevie were only too happy to oblige them. “Protection” became one of their favorite words; they’d learned it from the FBI.
Meanwhile, Howie Winter and Johnny Martorano were going broke. Eventually they had to go to Gerry Angiulo to borrow money. To make the weekly payments, they began going into business with people they didn’t know, and couldn’t trust.
And that was where Fat Tony Ciulla came in. The son of an East Boston fish merchant, Fat Tony Ciulla was six foot three, weighed 350 pounds, and at age thirty-five had been fixing horse races for almost half his life, mostly at smaller East Coast tracks. He had also worked as a driver for Joe Barboza.
In 1973, Fat Tony began laying off bets on fixed races with a bookie connected to Winter Hill. Somehow, Howie Winter found out the races were fixed, and Fat Tony was summoned to a meeting at Chandler’s. Fat Tony owed Howie $6
,000, and six months after he paid it off, he started showing up at the garage.
Very soon Fat Tony was partners with Winter Hill. They supplied the cash and the mules to lay down bets across the country, and Fat Tony provided the doped-up horses and the bribed jockeys. Gerry Angiulo warned Howie Winter to steer clear of Fat Tony, but Howie and Johnny—and Stevie and Whitey and everyone else at the garage—didn’t care.
The money was too good.
In November 1975, Whitey eliminated the final holdouts in the South Boston underworld. One of the guys he’d always liked least was Tommy King. Tommy wasn’t terribly bright, but he was absolutely fearless. Tommy had tried to get with the new program in Southie, even assisting Whitey in the murder of Paulie McGonagle a year earlier. Now he was a potential witness against Whitey. Then he got the best of Whitey in a barroom brawl, and that rocketed him to the top of the Hit Parade.
Whitey began “lobbying,” as Stevie later put it, for the elimination of Tommy King. As the top guy in the non-Mafia underworld, Howie Winter had to sign off on every hit, just as Raymond Patriarca did on Mafia assassinations. By 1975, Howie had enough headaches without having to worry about the Byzantine intricacies of the Southie underworld, so he finally gave Whitey the okay.
Once he had the green light, Whitey began lulling King into a fatal complacency. Like Don Corleone in The Godfather, Whitey was keeping his friends close and his enemies closer. After a while, Whitey told King he needed some help on a hit. Eddie Connors had a partner, and he was making noises about avenging his late pal. The guy that was to be hit, Whitey said, was named Suitcase Fidler.
So the boys would get together, and whack Suitcase. Everyone would show up at Carson Beach on the night of November 5, 1975. Stevie would pass out guns, and then they’d drive over to wherever Suitcase was and whack him.
It was a moonless night, and one by one they climbed into the car—Whitey and Tommy in the front seat, Stevie and Johnny Martorano in the back. Stevie had a paper bag with the .38s, and he handed them out. All were loaded except the one he gave to Tommy King.